Top Cloud Great Hotel Suzhou

... with a copy of my itinerary for 11/11 to fly from shanghai to new york city. this is the second time i've given it to the accountant, but i wanted to make sure that everything was ok. this time she looked at the receipt and said this is no good without the boarding pass. i said i haven't taken this flight yet so there would be no boarding pass. she said that i'll have to bring her a new one with a boarding pass.

after several more mins ...

so it's official. i have less than a month in china now. and not surprising, it's beginning to affect my sleep. i woke up this morning at 7. my first class isn't until 1 p.m. so why was i up so early? because of stress and anxiety. despite my better intentions, i always procrastinate til the last minute to do everything. preparing for home hasn't been an exception.

i finally bought the final leg of my trip today. from nyc to nola on 11/17. so i'll be in ny for a week hanging out ...

Today us canadians celebrated Thanksgiving! you must be thinking, "rice on thanksgiving? that's ********" but no my friends we had a TURKEY! And stuffing and potatoes and gravy, oh my god i'm the fullest i've ever been in my life! It was one of the best nights i've had so far actually, I really don't think i've laughed as much as i did tonight since i've gotten here so thats always a plus =). Celebrating thanksgiving with friends is quite ...

... silk, and it was real. They weren't just there to entertain visitors, they were really working. There was one section which had looms producing brocade silk. It was really fun to watch. I have seen women working on old fashioned wooden looms before, and to see a huge automatic one was pretty cool. After we went through the museum we went into their shopping area. It was impeccably ...

A rainy day today due to a typhoon but didn't hinder our day. We visited the Master of the Nets Garden and the Humble Administrator's Garden.
The Humble Administrator's Garden was established in the 16th century by a retired magistrate, Wang Xianchen, and developed over the years as subsequent owners made changes according to the fashion of the day. A 16th century painting shows that originally the garden was less decorative than ...

We leave Shanghai at 9am for Suzhou on the way we visit a water town established about 700 years ago and check out some of the old homes of the wealthy people back then that are surrounded by water canals. We then take a boat ride along the canals.
Had a lovely traditional dinner including a pig hock cooked and marinated in like a soy sauce, it was very nice.
We check into our Suzhou Hotel - Suzhou is about 1 and a half ...

As most of you probably know, Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) falls a month or so later than ours. This year, the Year of the Ox started on Jan 26th. Although this is technically my second Chinese New Year in China, I was a tourist last year and didn't really take part in the celebrations. Aside from this, I was in Hong Kong and Macau which have quite different celebrations from the Shanghai area. Since my aim this year is to get involved more in everything (it is very easy to fall ...

Some exploring of alley's one sunny afternoon provided us the opportunity to catch a glimpse into what life is really like for Suzhouren.  The fact that this city has a population of 6 million people is entirely obscure within these quiet, peaceful back alleys. 

Carolyn, Ben and I made our first trip to Soochow University today. We met with Tan Yu Kim, the Director of the Overseas Students program. Soochow currently has a thousand foreign students from 36 countries. Things went well as we discussed the possibility of having Cy-Fair ...

... We also sort of bought a DVD player (a storey in itself - we had 10 shop assistants helping us at one point). Kind of extravagant but its been great blobbing out in front of the TV after school and in the weekend (no English cinemas). So we tended to have 3 - 4 weekly cinema nights with the rest of the people from the school at our apartments, which were almost ...